An Accelerated Longitudinal Design Study Examining Emotional Engagement toward Learning Science from Grades 3 through 12

Abstract

Abstract As educators, we often see the enthusiasm for learning science in schools starting out strong in primary years and then fading as student progress into middle and secondary school. The motivation of this study is to offer a picture of how students’ emotional engagement in learning school science changes from Grades 3 to 12. This study applies an accelerated longitudinal design which collected data from 11 back-to-back cohorts of students from four US school districts. Each cohort was surveyed two times each school year, fall and spring, over two years in four waves of data collection. The sample includes more than 7000 participants. While a longitudinal study spanning this period of time would take nearly a decade to complete and pose significant data collection and data integrity challenges, the accelerated longitudinal design provides a simulation of longitudinal data in a two-year time span. The results show an unambiguous decline in emotional engagement which appears to begin in Grade 3 continuing to Grade 9 before flattening to ambivalent levels in Grade 10. These findings show that the decline happens both across and within each grade level. These results suggest that the decline is not just an artifact of science becoming more challenging in upper grade levels, but rather school science experiences may be having a negative impact within each school year.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Research in Science Education, 2026 · DOI ↗